ABSTRACT: This paper explores the relationship between justice and government, examining views on the subject expressed by traditional political philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, as well as those expressed by contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. According to Rawls, justice is one of the fundamental concerns of a governing body; Locke and Rousseau agree that government and justice are essentially connected. Nozick and Max Weber, however, claim that the essential characteristic of government is not justice, but power. This paper argues that government, as an institution formed and controlled by human beings, is subject to the moral injunction to treat human beings as entities accorded certain rights, and included among these rights is the right to just treatment. Governments are therefore enjoined to be just because human beings, as rational agents, and therefore persons, are owed the minimal respect due a person, such as the right to freedom and the right to forbearance from harm by others to self and property.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;...that to secure these rights governments are instituted...." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments"
Does government have an obligation to act justly? John Rawls cites justice in A Theory of Justice as the "first virtue of social institutions" (1971, p. 3), of which a government is one example. He writes expansively in the beginning of his book on the importance of justice and of its centrality in a "well-ordered" society. Eloquently, Rawls extols the primacy of justice, and asserts that no matter how efficie...
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There is no justice when humans are living in the state of mere nature in “this war of every man against every man...nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong or just and unjust have there no place.”(188) These are the conditions that constitute mere nature. Justice has to battle all of human desire just to begin to establish a foothold in an arena where force and fraud are the supreme virtues.(188) Anything and everything is allowed in mere nature and absolute liberty “without impediment”(189) is used accordingly, as ones own reason dictates. When Human desires and aversions are pursued for only self preservation this puts us in a state of perpetual war with one another on an individual level, each of us doing whatever is necessary to survive. Therefore to establish justice is to first institute laws and government, but before this can be done you have to decide who or what entity has the right to do so? How is this power transferred to them? And at what
27.) Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History. 4th ed. (W.W. Norton, 2012), 815.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
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The political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx examined the role that the state played and its relationship to its citizen’s participation and access to the political economy during different struggles and tumultuous times. Rousseau was a believer of the concept of social contract with limits established by the good will and community participation of citizens while government receives its powers given to it. Karl Marx believed that power was to be taken by the people through the elimination of the upper class bourgeois’ personal property and capital. While both philosophers created a different approach to establishing the governing principles of their beliefs they do share a similar concept of eliminating ownership of capital and distributions from the government. Studying the different approaches will let us show the similarities of principles that eliminate abuse of power and concentration of wealth by few, and allow access for all. To further evaluate these similarities, we must first understand the primary principles of each of the philosophers’ concepts.
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” (Declaration of Independence,1776)
The concept of organizational culture is one of the most debated topics for researchers and theorists. There is no one accepted definition of culture. People even said that it is hard to define culture and even more change it. It is considered a complex part of an organization although many have believed that culture influences employee behavior and organizational effectiveness (Kilmann, Saxton, & Serpa 1985; Marcoulides & Heck, 1993; Schein, 1985a, 1990).